2

Jerold Kayden cochairing “Zoning at 100: A Symposium for the Future”

Jerold Kayden, the GSD’s Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, is co-chairing upcoming colloquium “Zoning at 100: A Symposium for the Future,” to be held Thursday, September 15 at the NYC Bar Association. Kayden joins symposium co-chair Carl Weisbrod, Director of the New York City Department of City Planning and Chair of the New York City Planning Commission. The symposium also features a pair of GSD alumni: Maurice Cox (LF ’02), the newly appointed Planning Director of the City of Detroit, and Ana Gelabert-Sanchez (MLA ’84/LF ’11), Principal of Gelabert-Sanchez LLC and a design critic at the GSD.

“Zoning at 100” gathers Cox, Gelabert-Sanchez, and 26 other speakers—including New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio—to explore how zoning may be deployed to create more equitable, productive, sustainable, and livable cities. The symposium in part marks the centenary of New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution, a measure adopted primarily to prevent massive buildings from blocking light and air from reaching the streets below. This resolution was the first comprehensive zoning measure in the United States controlling the use and development of land.

Throughout the day-long symposium, participants will discuss the history of New York City’s zoning, the zoning and land-use regulatory experience in a series of cities around the country and the world, and the connections between planning and zoning.

Zoning is one of the many issues in which Kayden has been a leading figure over the course of his career. His teaching and scholarship focus on land use law and environmental law, public-private real estate development, public space in cities, and urban disaster resilience. He is quoted regularly in national media as an expert on these and related issues. Last summer, he discussed the public-private space implications in Trump Tower with the New York Timesand examined Boston’s privately-owned public spaces with Radio Boston.

“Done well, cities can lead to greater tolerance, a sense of pluralism of beliefs, that we need in this world,” Kayden told Radio Boston host Meghna Chakrabarti. “That’s the aspirational description of what a city is. And public spaces… are actually dedicated spaces for people to gather, become the physical vessel in which this aspirational publicness of cities can be accomplished.”